After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs. — Emily Dickinson

The Carnival of The NBA, No. 28, comes to us as quixotic exercise, more The Pain than The Hope, a Vision rather than a Sign. We stand here in wonder, on both sides of the fatalistic divide. For, who is it that we Are, if we do not know who we shall Be?

This is only the future. And that future is the Carnival of The NBA, after the jump.

Ah, high school, such time of learning and loss, of wistful remembrances and raging erections. Gilbert's Arena brings us Wizards yearbook photos, and it is through this that we must not forget, for the days are fleeting and the nights are approaching. We look at high school-aged gentlemen who stand in for Zack Randolph at Blazers Edge, and we are reminded that at our cores, we are all impersonators, we are all empty men.

Ron Artest may no longer be with us, but his presence is felt, even it means living on through black agate text on a solid white unpretentious background. YAYSports! mystery of Who Shot Mamba? remains one of the more pressing issues of our time, though ... what is our time, if not a construct of our own belief system? What Kant called "the maxim of your actions." Though that might have been "angle of the dangle."

A monumental task? Fixing all kinds of off-season Bobcats problems. A task fit for Sisyphus, who was a sissy and girl and shouldn't have been playing with rocks anyway. Is running a call-in podcast such an endeavor? Or is it through this that dreams come, that the future holds promise and joy and hope. Camus wrote "all modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State," but he married a morphine addict, so what the hell does he know?

How is a void filled? What kind of void? Well, an empty void. Blue and Gold attempts to pick up the pieces of a so-close postseason run. A great man once said that mathematics was the opiate of the masses — or something like that — so LowPost.net looks at regular season performance vs. the playoffs. It is only when the lights shine brightest than a man can truly discover his own worth, or at least the 95 percent of his worth his agent allows him to keep.

You cannot rank a warrior, but you can chart a Warrior, particularly if that warrior looks like a Sudoku nerd from Duke. Screaming from the womb, collicking, cranky and glorious, comes Give Me The Rock, and just as birth as a renewal, so too is the cleansing nature of a good bath in olive oil. (Watch the crevices.) Speaking of birth and renewal, True Hoop turned one year old, and it is through the eyes of a child that we might all be found, or, at least, located for a short while.